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Wednesday, August 5, 2015

A minister (John Durbin) reads the Bible to his horse whilst trekking along a
trail (his extremely clean “Old West” costume is the only indication we get
that this is set before the turn of the Twentieth Century [okay, and the fact
that he’s reading the Bible], because a subtitle would have been too tricky to
put on screen, I suppose) when he catches sight of a “meteor” which crashes to
earth nearby.Cut to: a bright, sunny
day, at a cabin in Demon Wood (duh duh DUUUHHHH!), where Bill (bulletproof
check casher George Kennedy) and his
doting daughter Julie (Jill Marin)
are playing a rousing game of Trivial Pursuit™ when a Bigfoot-ian creature
bursts through the door, roughs Bill up, and kills his daughter before dragging
her corpse off into the unknown.Cut to:
a van full of idiots, including Jack (David
Michael O’Neill), nephew of the owner of the aforementioned cabin, wending
its way through the woods to investigate (unbeknownst to all but Jack and his
girlfriend Carrie [Pamela Gilbert])
the expanding circle of weird goings-on in the forest (including the
disappearance of said uncle).Horror
wants to ensue!

And so we come to Emmett Alston’s Demonwarp, an interesting premise in search of a good
execution.It’s set up initially as a
slasher film with an animal (even though we can call the Bigfoot an alien,
considering the prologue, but it still acts like an animal) as its villain
(most precisely, the one we see the most).It has the group of horny young people going out to a remote location to
be killed in gory fashion.It has bare
female breasts galore (including two belonging to the lovely [and wasted,
unless you count her boobs, though it could also be argued that they are the
long and the short of her, if one were inclined to be a bit mean about it] Michelle Bauer).It has a crazy old coot, trying in vain to
warn the youths away from the area.It
has POV shots from the monster’s perspective (and I’ll get back to this later)
as it stalks its prey.And this got me thinking.In many ways, a creature feature isn’t all
that different from a slasher movie.Both
have antagonists who pop up at the worst possible times to dispose of irritating
characters.Both have antagonists who represent
unknown quantities.Both have
antagonists who are non-verbal in the main (characters like Freddy Krueger and
the more charismatic baddies notwithstanding), and in this way are even more
inscrutable.After all, if you don’t
know why bad things are happening to you, they seem more tragic (this being
based on the notion that most people believe that they are, at heart, good
people).The thing that should separate
them is the human psyche, yet the way characters like these are regularly
portrayed, there is little indication that such exists outside of the impetus
for their individual geneses.The
Bigfoot in this film is not going to answer questions and develop a relationship
with Jack like Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling.The Bigfoot is irrational, animal,
primal.So, the Bigfoot (or something
like the bear from Grizzly, let’s say)
are essentially the same as Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, and both types can
then be viewed as universal/natural forces.They do what they do, they do it very well, and they are inescapable
because their victims exist in the villains’ world.

Another aspect that the film
plays with is the concept of fanaticism.Jack is fanatical about solving the mystery of Demon Wood.Bill is fanatical about killing the
Bigfoot.The two characters are
identical in this way, but they don’t trust one another, fanatics tending to be
a bit paranoid.This fanaticism reduces
Jack and Bill to the goal of their myopic quest, and it removes them from the
normal world.They become loners, and,
distanced from humanity, they become a bit deranged.Of course, Kennedy is about ten times (maybe more) the actor that O’Neill is, so it’s possible that Alston and company were trying to
delineate the interior conflict between Jack’s crusade into the Bigfoot’s world
and his desire to escape from it with his friends and return to the ordinary
one.It doesn’t work, because O’Neill plays Jack as so intense and
unlikable (he snaps at Carrie and Cindy [Colleen
McDermott] no matter what they say, no matter how much sense or nonsense
they talk) that not only do you not want to follow him to the culmination of
his journey, but you kind of wish the monster would just appear and rip his
head off so that the film would just end.There is also the fanaticism of the minister, but his fanaticism is
purely religious in nature, though, like Jack and Bill, his narrow world view
allows him to be lulled in by what he believes to be an angel, though the alien
villain (hint: not the Bigfoot) is in actuality a “devil.”The zealotry of his believer’s mind
ultimately makes the minister do evil, because he has essentially met God (to
his mind), and since he was devoted to this deity before it asked him to
sacrifice human beings (and, of course, there is at least one story with
sacrifice at its center in the Bible), it is just a short trip from
faithfulness to maleficence (a theme which feels all too easy to believe in the
face of what we know about and learn more of in our non-cinematic
reality).All this said, that Jack is allowed
to live, even though he doesn’t come to any revelation about his shortcomings,
makes no attempt to change himself, and is still a grade-A peckerwood by the
time the film ends, makes the film less satisfying than it was already.His arc is a flatline.

I’ve said often that POV handheld
camera shots do not work all that well when used for an extended period of time
(Dark Passage and The Lady in the Lake being the two
notable exceptions that always spring to my mind).In horror films, they tend to work even less,
since we know that they are either going to be false (a cat jumps onto a
character’s back or whatever) or exactly what they appear to be (yet still
somehow unsatisfying in their predetermination).The effectiveness of this technique varies by
filmmaker, and I can confidently say that Emmett
Alston is not a director who should employ POV very often, or even at
all.That’s the problem.Just about every two minutes of Demonwarp, we get either shaky handheld
POV shots or shaky handheld shots of legs running or walking (sometimes
both).You may think I’m exaggerating
this.I’m not.In fact, I may be underestimating the
frequency of these occurrences.I’m
guessing that the filmmakers thought this would keep pacing up and build some
tension in the stalking scenes.Instead,
it becomes swiftly redundant to the point that I actually groaned every time I
saw yet another of these shots (though it does give us Kennedy swinging an ax in direct address, so that’s one in the plus
column).This level of (what I can only
surmise is) naiveté, which can be charming even in junk movies, is herein
merely annoying, and worst of all, boring.This is yet another example of a film that has everything I like
(mashing up pulp horror and science fiction and revenge and survival genres,
amongst other things), but is so breathtakingly dull, it’s a chore to sit
through.

MVT:The Bigfoot costume
(and other creature effects), courtesy of John
Carl Buechler, are solid fun.Unfortunately, like a twig placed under a hunk of pig iron, it just
can’t hold up enough of the picture to make any of it worth one’s time.

Make or Break:The scene
where Tom (Billy Jayne of the late,
lamented Parker Lewis Can’t Lose
television series) goes full Jack
Nicholson not only made the large vein in my forehead begin to throb, but
it also made me want to grab my television and stomp it to death for showing me
this travesty.Thankfully, the latter
never came to fruition.

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